Chalk Farm at Underbelly, Cowgate

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“It’s not about a new bike. Or history. Or politics or bankers or police, or revenge, or a cry for help. It’s so massively f***ing about everything and nothing all at once.”

A year on from the London riots, 14-year-old Jamie (played with shining innocent sharpness by Thomas Dennis) has it summed up. ThickSkin theatre (script by Kieran Hurley and A.J. Taudevin) offers a taut, explosive duologue with him and his mother Maggie. Yet it eschews simplistic explanations for a shining fragment of individual lives. Maggie (Julia Taudevin) is not a stereotypical troubled, druggy, abused single mother: she answers the